Socialist Review, June 1994

John Parrington

All in the mind

How do children learn as they grow up? Right wingers would have
us believe that they need strict and traditional methods of teaching.
John Parrington argues that we can understand a lot more by
looking at the work of the revolutionary Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky

Major steps forward were made by a group of Russian psychologists
in the 1920s and 1930s, working under the guidance of Lev Vygotsky,
who died 60 years ago this month. Vygotsky’s work is of particular
interest to socialists because of his use of Marxism in the search
for understanding human consciousness.

Why is Vygotsky’s work of such interest? After all, practically
all of the different schools of psychology in Russia at this time
identified themselves as ‘Marxist’. The problem was that this
usually consisted simply of tacking a few quotations from Marx and
Engels on to an already existing, often mechanistic, view of the
mind. In contrast Vygotsky declared that ‘a materialist psychology
has to be built having learned the whole of Marx’s method’. This
meant identifying the material factors which shape the mind as it
develops through childhood.

What are these factors? For a start, we are born into and grow up
within a social environment. The process of mental development is
characterised by a transformation of the ‘lower’ or natural
functions into ‘higher’ or cultural ones, which are specific to
human beings. Society provides the material for this transformation
in the form of language. Vygotsky argued that words can be viewed as
a sort of ‘psychological tool’. Unlike regular tools, which are
used to control and transform the natural world, words act upon the
mind itself.

Vygotsky demonstrated that language increasingly plays the role of
a kind of ‘scaffolding’ in helping to organise our practical
activities. At first this function is overt, such as children talking
to themselves as they play, but it continues, although hidden, even
after words become internalised as thoughts later in a child’s development.

His view of the mind as social in its origins, even down to its
very structure, is completely different from the picture presented by
most mainstream psychologists, who tend to counterpose the individual
and society.

This is only one side of the equation that describes the
development of the mind. The other crucial factor is the role of
practical activity which, as it becomes linked to words in childhood,
ensures that the social structuring of the mind is far from a passive
process. Indeed, Vygotsky believed that this linkage was the key to
understanding human consciousness.

Instead of being a passive recipient of information, the child
actively seeks out the words and concepts that make sense of its
everyday practical experience. This continual testing of the meaning
of language against reality is one of the features that allows the
child to reach towards future knowledge and abilities. It is apparent
in the incredible creativity and questioning nature we associate with children.

Of course under capitalism such creativity is all too often
stifled early in life and instead we see a passive adaptation to the
values and language of society. However, this potential of the human
mind remains, and in a period of social crisis the gap between the
dominant ideas of society and the reality faced by workers can become
so great that the questioning and creative sides of the human
character can surface. Vygotsky’s ideas help to explain how people
can rapidly begin to challenge, at times of great social upheaval,
views they have held for most of their lives.

Vygotsky himself rarely dealt with directly political questions,
such as the growth of class consciousness. Part of the reason for
this was that he was formulating his ideas in a situation where the
workers had already seized power. Vygotsky and his colleagues were
totally committed to ensuring that the new socialist state would
survive. Their main goal was to develop ways of dealing with some of
the enormous practical problems facing Russian society. It was a
country attempting to move rapidly from semi-feudalism to socialism
whose backwardness was further exacerbated by world war and civil war.

The problems included widespread illiteracy, cultural differences,
and an almost total absence of services for those who were mentally
retarded or otherwise unable to participate in the new society. At
the same time the goal of education in the new socialist state was
seen in a much wider perspective than these immediate concerns. At
the heart of this revolution in education was the ideal of the
‘development of the total personality of all human beings’.

Vygotsky’s views on education follow on from his general ideas
about the mind. They have great relevance for the present debate over
teaching methods. In the same way that he saw social interaction
acting as a kind of ‘scaffolding’ for the development of the
child, Vygotsky believed that individuals learnt best when learning
was part of experiences. This stands in contrast to the Tories who,
as part of their attack on education, want teachers to concentrate on
the formal aspects of skills such as reading and writing rather than
relating them to the students’ own interests and experience.

Interestingly, Vygotsky’s approach has been recently vindicated
by a series of studies in the United States which have successfully
taught literary skills precisely along the lines he proposed. One
group, working in a deprived area of Chicago, situated reading and
writing in more everyday activities like talking, drawing and even
play, while in a school in Arizona, writing classes were geared to
the children’s every day experiences outside the classroom. This
took the form of project work whose content was drawn from the
working class community where the knowledge of parents and other
workers in the community was enlisted. In these studies, spelling and
grammar were not ignored, but the emphasis was put primarily on
treating reading and writing as communicative and meaningful. With
such an approach even the most uninterested or apparently incapable
children made dramatic improvements in their literary skills.

Vygotsky was also highly critical of the sort of tests which the
Tories have tried to introduce into schools. He attacked their class
and cultural bias, and also made the criticism that such tests tell
us very little about learning potential. He proposed that a true
assessment of a child’s ability should not just consider what it
can achieve unaided, but also what can be achieved through
collaboration with others. Of course such cooperative learning is
exactly what the Tories would like to stop in our schools.

As well as his general interest in educational issues, Vygotsky
was also particularly concerned with the problems faced by those with
learning difficulties. Indeed, he practically founded what we call
special education. He investigated the nature of ‘mental illnesses’
such as schizophrenia, began to look into the biological basis of
consciousness and even advised the film director Eisenstein on how to
portray complex ideas visually on the screen.

At their height in the late 1920s Vygotsky’s views about the
mind were among the most influential in Russia. Tragically, Stalin
would all too soon put an end to the exciting period of creativity
and experimentation that flourished after the revolution. Vygotsky
was denounced for ‘bourgeois idealism’ (mainly due to his
willingness to consider the work of psychologists such as Freud and
Piaget) and after his death in 1934 his work was banned.

The psychology that then became dominant was Pavlov’s
reflexology, a sterile and mechanical view of the mind admirably
suited to the totalitarian system that grew up under Stalin. It is a
sign of Vygotsky’s importance that his work is gaining prominence
again after being buried for so many years.